It’s that time of the year when the November Thoughtworks Technology Radar appears. Again my colleagues have taken a sweep of the technologies that our teams have used in the field, and pulled together a summary of what’s popped up in the last six months. It’s been a busy half-year, one that again has been dominated by AI, and that’s reflected in the many AI blips on the radar. The mass of blips makes it hard to develop a coherent story around trends, but Chris Ford has done a fine ...

Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping . The beeps were far enough apart that standing in the room and trying to determine the source of the noise was frustrating, and I really didn't want to dig through every one of those boxes. So I had Claude Code build Beep Locator , a software system for triangulating the source of a mysterious beep using multiple devices scatter...

For our last movie night we watched Princess Mononoke . I remembered loving that movie when I was younger, but watching it as an adult made me once again realize how Miyazaki has a way of expressing diverging sides without picking one. The film shows people, animals and spirits with legitimate and largely incompatible needs, and each faction is further engaged in infighting. A central arc of the story is Lady Eboshi’s Irontown, which gives people who were largely rejected by society work,...

By Shreya S Ramanujam , Yongce Li , Afshine Amidi , Sina Ghiassian , Benjamin Klein . Introduction Picture this — you’re home after a long day at work and can’t wait to catch up on Bridgerton. You log on to Netflix, search for “Bridgerton” and land on this screen: If this sounds familiar, you already know what a synopsis is — it’s a short glimpse into what a viewer can expect to see in a show. We see two types of synopses here: a series-level synopsis describing th...

LANCE: You should take a break from all the AI stuff and talk about your book! BILL: I will!  But it's not my book  its co-authored with Erik Demaine and Mohammad Hajiaghayi. The title is Computational Intractability: A Guide to Algorithmic Lower Bounds LANCE: That sounds similar to Garey and Johnson's classic Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness BILL: Indeed. DGH is a sequel to Garey and Johnson. LANCE: But so much has happened since 1979. BILL: Yes. That's ...

I recently took on a project to implement a language model on an FPGA. In simple terms, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an IC that can be reconfigured to implement hardware circuit designs written in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as SystemVerilog. They are particularly interesting because you don't run software on them the way you would using microcontrollers. Instead, you reconfigure the chip into a hardware design. This gives you things that you couldn't get in software ...

Landscape with mill and cattle, by Jacob van Strij, via WikiArt. Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Florida’s property tax rollback, projected PCB shortages, the end of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the lack of progress in carbon storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I accidentally em...

LLMs don’t know how to design software that uses LLMs. They’re comfortable writing normal programs, but if you throw an AI-shaped problem at them, they will usually screw it up. Why is that? Going down the symbolic rabbit hole For example, this post describes an attempt to vibe-code a memory tool that would flag when one memory contradicted another 1 . This is a great instance of a task that was virtually impossible five years ago but is now relatively trivial due to LLMs. You can si...

This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A helicopter crew flies a night route in a simulator. The copilot/gunner switches to thermal to identify a building near the landing zone. The building is in the right place, but does it look as it would through the aircraft’s actual sensor? The gunner uses the display to practice recognizing objects and making engagement decisions. If the simulated sensor shows features the real equip...

Another member of the extended family came down to Sydney over the weekend, so we went for a bit of exploring. I’ve been back in Australia for more than a decade now, but there’s still so much of this beautiful city and its surrounds I’ve never seen before; being with someone from overseas lets me be a bit of a tourist, too. The highlight for me was seeing South Head in the Sydney Harbour National Park for the first time. This is part of the headlands that sit between the Sydney CBD ...

By a mile, the iPhone Duo has garnered more questions about what I think about it than any other phone I’ve ever had. It’s clearly a phone that has people intrigued, so I thought I’d jot down some loose, unorganized thoughts about what I think about it after about ten days. If I could sum all my thoughts up into one word, it’d simply be “fun”. I think for the vast majority of people, myself included, the iPhone 18 Pro is a more practical phone that through scientific analysis y...

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the LEV-2 crawler bot (inset image) and India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter (background). An arrow points to the tiny lander on the image’s right. Images: JAXA / TOMY / SONY / ISRO / Chandra Tungathurthi This story pieces together insights from experts at JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. On January 19, 2024, Japan’s solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating Moon ( SLIM) lander made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on Earth’s cosmic companion. ...

I’m old enough to remember when graphical user interfaces appeared on desktop machines in the 1980s. Many of them were wrappers around pre-existing programs; while some programmers (including my younger self) sneered at them for being pointless eye candy, all of a sudden ordinary people didn’t have to remember a long list of obscure command-line spells in order to make computers do useful things. I’m now old enough to remember when LLMs appeared in the 2020s. All of a sudden people didn...

Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL). 1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor...

What's up on the smolweb? October 2026 roundup 2026-11-07 13:00 November has arrived, the leaves are turning, and the smolnet is doing what it always does: quietly growing, debating, and building. Here is what happened in October 2026 on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol. Geminispace in late October: 5,128 known capsules, 3,033 recently connected The Lupa crawler (Stephane Bortzmeyer's Geminispace survey) was last updated on November 7, 2026. It currently lists ...

TL;DR: gilguard is a tiny, zero-dependency package for free-threaded Python (3.13t, 3.14t, 3.15t). Import it first. If any later import quietly turns the GIL back on, you get an error naming the extension module, the package that shipped it, and the line of your code that pulled it in. python -m gilguard audits an entire environment in one go. It’s on PyPI now, and it’s the second piece of a larger free-threaded Python effort I’ve been working on. The quiet failure mode of free-thre...

Our fast_float library parses numbers such as -731.51 into binary floating-point values. It is part of GCC’s C++ standard library, among others. It is fast: often a few nanoseconds per number. Parsing a number means making decisions. Is there a sign? How many digits are there? Where is the decimal point? Is the processor rounding in the default mode? Each decision is a branch in the code. Modern processors do not wait to know the outcome of a branch: they guess, and they keep working. Wh...

Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ ...

Opened curtains — Field of fog envelops The autumn day. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ Foggy sky, look close Only near trees visible: Standing colour. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ Ebbing weather Temporary heavy air Winter approaches. Opened curtains — Field of fog envelops The autumn day. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ Foggy sky, look close Only near trees visible: Standing colour. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ Ebbing weather Temporary heavy air Winter approaches. Opened curtains — Field of fog envelops The autumn day. ⁂ ...

Some metrics When I set up the infrastructure for Casuarina Linux I repurposed an AMD AM4 system with Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core CPU (105W TDP) and 32Gb of DDR4 RAM as the build server. I set it up in our laundry, connected it via a smart plug, and reset its counters. Over the course of the project I would regularly pull package updates from Chimera Linux , build and install them locally, and then push them to the repo, which would trigger Buildbot to build and publish them. 💡 A...

Tekkoh on an iPhone Duo opened flat: the margin of the day on the left, your words on the right. (All the screenshots here are of a made-up demo journal.) Tekkoh is a journal for iPhone. Tekkoh on an iPhone Duo opened flat: the margin of the day on the left, your words on the right. (All the screenshots here are of a made-up demo journal.) Tekkoh is a journal for iPhone.

There are a couple of related ideas I found myself writing about here and there, either on the IRC server or on Quxnet . Ideas and thoughts about what the web used to be, how it used to feel, about how things have changed, and what can be done to bring at least some of the old web back. We often point fingers at the big social media platforms, with their relentless algorithmic curation as the cause for the awfulness of the modern web. Maybe we blame the SEO folks, or the influencers. There’...

Well here we are again. Linux 7.3 is out and it’s been an eventful few months, so let’s get stuck in to another Asahi Linux progress report! Upstreaming continues As always, upstreaming work continues to progress. Aside from the usual patches for low-level SoC blocks, two major drivers made it on to the list this cycle: macaudio and avd. Getting macaudio ready for submission has been a challenge. The audio subsystem on Apple Silicon devices is rather special, and required quite a number of c...